Sofía Zea Universidade da Coruña “Attributive Adjectives in 18th Century Scientific Texts
from the Coruña Corpus.”
ABSTRACT
This work will focus on the study of attributive adjectives through a comparison of two eighteenth-century sets of texts taken from The Coruña Corpus: A Collection of Samples for the Historical Study of English Scientific Writing. The first set draws on texts from Life Sciences, pertaining to the field of Natural Sciences, and the second set contains History texts, from the field of Humanities, following UNESCO’s classification (1978). This comparison will enable us to discuss the frequency and use of attributive adjectives in eighteenth-century scientific texts, and to identify differences in the use of attributive adjectives in relation to three variables: discipline (Life Science vs. History), sex of the author and text-type (treatises, textbooks, letters, essays, etc). The analysis will include an examination of comparative and superlative adjectives, as well as compound adjectives and demonyms.